Most, if not all, reputable SEO companies tout the benefits of social linking for a website. If you’ve ever wanted to see some proof – or a breakdown of what exactly social media will do for you – I have just what you’ve been looking for.

MarketingSherpa (a reputable research organization that specializes in tracking marketing trends and has been praised by The Economist and Entrepreneur.com) recently conducted a case study on the effectiveness of social media in a couple different arenas. As anyone familiar with social media and search engine optimization would expect, the results put a very positive spin on social media and the value of linking.

Social Linking Effectiveness Breakdown

As you can see in the chart, social media has been shown to influence brand reputation by 39% and increase brand awareness by 37%. Social media helps improve search engine rankings by 38%. In all instances, social media was considered at least somewhat effective.

Social media can incorporate blogging, posting websites and information on networks such as Digg and StumbleUpon, directory submissions, issuing press releases and more. It increases your website’s visibility and presence on the internet, making it more likely for your site to rank well in search engines. Naturally, increased visibility and presence means increased website traffic as well.

Qualified SEO companies will help you strategize and develop a social media campaign that specifically targets your market audience and best publicizes your particular service or product. 

PageRank has been pretty dependent on linking for a while now.  It’s well known that the more incoming links you have pointing to your website, the higher the authority Google assigns to it.  Linking has progressed to be more detail oriented in relation to Algorithms.  In fact most of your page’s ranking on Google is not just dependent on the amount of quality links pointing to your website, but how it is linked.

Google now takes into account several attributes which include, but are not limited to:

• Authority level
• PageRank
• IP class

In order to procure several good quality inbound links to pages on your website, it is imperative to have a dynamic strategy to your approach.

Blogs
Blogging is a very effective way to acquire quick links.  A good strategy is review related website blogs and comment to promote your own website.  There are several websites out there that offer professional blog reviewers for hire, or you yourself can commit your personal time to accomplish similar goals.

Search Engine Optimized Articles
Writing good quality articles with keywords strategically placed is another great way to get high quality inbound links.  Obviously you’ll want to stick with content related to your website. Submitting them to article directories provides a very speedy way of obtaining those links.  Adding these articles into your newsletters will add to the incoming links as well as keep your reader/client/customer involved with the presence of your services.  To top it off, it establishes you as an expert in your field.

Good Old Fashioned Reciprocal Linking
There is an ongoing debate whether or not reciprocal linking is as effective as it once was.  Obviously, a good, organic one way link from an authoritative site to your own is definitely the best link to procure, however just not easy in multiples.  In my own 4+ years of experience with-in the field, I have found that reciprocal links continue to offer great value.  Not only have I seen PageRank increase because of reciprocal linking, but it also introduces all kinds of other advertising opportunities.

(Reference: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/07/29/top-3-google-seo-linking-strategies/)

Jennifer Kaufman
Linking Strategist

One of the easiest automated methods of acquiring links these days is using software to auto-fill comments on related blogs, forums, Pligg sites, etc. (Note: MorePro does not use automated methods of building links; we build all links manually).  There are many blog commenting tools to choose from, including Comment Kahuna, which has a pretty simple interface and good reporting tools.  Kahuna is not an auto-filling blog comment tool, but it does walk you through each blog step-by-step as you attempt to build incoming links to your website.

The problems that occur, of course, are that most of the blogs that get identified are using “nofollow” tags in their commenting systems.  To some, including the creator of the Kahuna program, links are valuable regardless of where they are placed or if the nofollow tag is being used.  While I have some belief that this is accurate, I don’t feel that submitting to nofollowed blogs is a good use of time & resources.  I believe that all references to a domain, nofollowed or not, can help to build the authority of that website (or author) and that at some point, the authority may help factor into the site’s rankings.  But in the interest of client’s money and the work that we complete, our intentions are always to target high-quality, relevant links.

The argument also exists that commenting on blogs with the nofollow tags enabled will help drive additional traffic to your website (via browsing readers).  While not completely far fetched, the amount of traffic you could get from something like this is minimal at best.

Ultimately, the process of acquiring good blog links (comments or other) boils down to participation and community involvement.  If you add value to an existing conversation and slowly build yourself up as a contributor, it becomes more likely that links you include in your comments and/or relationships you build with the blog owner will develop into something tangible.

Cory Howell
SEO Strategist

A lot of emphasis in the SEO world is focused on improving external linking or backlinks. Of course, since this is one of the most effective ways of improving search engine rankings, it is definitely an important aspect of search engine optimization.

While external links are often the focus, internal or “on-site” linking can be nearly just as important. The way links are set up on your own website can have both positive and negative effects on your search engine rankings. If you link to the wrong websites, you may be flagged or penalized. If you don’t optimize the links on your website with your important keywords, you’re certainly not getting the maximum rankings possible for your website.

Here’s what you can do to make sure you’re getting the most out of your website (in no particular order):

1. Use important keywords in your navigation and menu options. Without going overboard, try to use keywords that are popular and relevant to the page the link will be pointing to.
2. For any links you add that point to external websites, be sure to use the “nofollow” tag to ensure you’re not showing a “vote” for that website. Of course, there will be instances where you may want to maintain that vote, so don’t use the nofollow tag on those links. Nofollow tags can also be used to block the search engines from following pages* on your own site that are of little SEO value.
3. Within the body of your content, there may be opportunities to link to other pages on your website using relevant keywords as “anchor text”. If you choose to create links within your body content, be sure that you’re taking the site’s visitors into consideration - you wouldn’t want to add a link in a spot that may distract them from completing a goal (e-commerce sale, generating a lead, etc.).
4. If your images contain links to other important pages, be sure to use descriptive ALT tags that include the relevant keywords for the destination page.

*This is an advanced SEO technique and we do not suggest that you utilize this procedure on your website without consulting an SEO professional first.

The most important thing you need to understand is that your website is valuable and directly influences your company’s ability to rank well in the search engines. While we’ve included some basic linking recommendations here, it’s important that you research each method and determine if it’s something that’s right for your website. We suggest that you consult with an SEO company or consultant to ensure that you’re implementing these tactics correctly.

Jennifer Kaufman
Linking Strategist

The benefits of strategic linking to SEO are still alive and kicking. Though it’s not the only thing needed to make high rankings, in my experience it is the most effective way to gain authority. It’s amazing how much authority goes to a site with good quality links that point to it.

It’s important not to just take any link you can lasso in. The key is to get links from sites that have similar and supporting content. For example, a good reciprocal link for a food site, would be another site that is food related. The higher the page rank on their home page, the better for you.

You’ll also want to take advantage of your title and description. It’s important to do your research for terms that you want to show up for. When you find one you see as most appropriate, make sure you don’t already rank for it. Your goal is to rank high for a term you don’t already rank for. Your description should also be optimized and supportive towards your title.

If you want to take it a step further, find out what page you will be listed on on their site, and cater your title and description to the main theme of their site and page topic.

Jennifer Kaufman
Linking Strategist

The two biggest stories the past few weeks related to internet marketing and SEO are probably the new tools that Google and Yahoo both rolled out.

Google unveils more links
Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can now view/download a much larger scope of incoming links to your website.  In addition, you can view the links to specific pages on your site and generate an outgoing link report as well.  Here’s the official word from Vanessa Fox over at GWT:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information. Read the full story

I’ve tested the new link reports out and it doesn’t give you too much information that you probably don’t already have.  In addition, Matt Cutts stated that the reports are by no means 100% of the data available and don’t reflect the true number of links pointing to your site.  He also stated that just because a link is showing up in the report, that it’s not an indicator that the link is counted in the algorithm - it’s a simple report of the links, nothing more.

Yahoo Pipes unveiled
The general scope of “Yahoo Pipes” is the ability to combine RSS/feeds (or mash them together), and then manipulate the data in a way that’s useful for you or your website(s).  It’s basically an RSS masher & re-hasher.  The “pipes” name comes from the Unix pipes that let you combine commands (foreign to this writer).

What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Read the full story

Nice link from Yahoo Pipes btw… what, you couldn’t figure out how to use Mod Rewrite?

A member over on Cre8asite Forums started a topic suggesting that Link Baiting was ruining the web.

At first glance, the content seems informational, educational, or perhaps it’s just entertaining. However, that’s usually not the case: the content was only created to cause a temporary stir, a short sensation, a short-term mass of links, a short-term rise in popularity; perhaps in the hope of building a medium- or long-term reputation.

I don’t think it works that way, however. A “bubble-gum” content - nice, juicy, makes big bubbles: but stale after an hour. Boring. Lots of stale bubble-gum is just that: stale bubble gum. Lots of short term sensationalism / link-bait is the same: fresh for the moment, stale before your coffee gets cold. The only reputation that is built up is for providing stale bubble-gum. Looking at a website like that, you see a few fresh pieces, but 99% is old, out of date, out of fashion. Do you really want to be caught keeping old link-bait online?

Link baiting is one of the hottest methods for SEO companies and bloggers to increase their marketshare and their incoming link popularity.  All you need is a story or idea that people agree with and want to link to, or that they disagree with and make a big stink about it (gaining exposure for the original poster).

The comments in the forum post suggest that most link bait becomes stale pretty quickly, but I think it really depends on what the topic is and how useful the topic is to each reader.  For some folks, the information will become stale very quickly, but for others the topic could live on for several days/weeks/months or even years if it’s applicable to them or their business and it’s provides a benefit/value to them.